2010-11-05 The Wiki Nature of This Blog

I recently saw an essay by SamRose, linked to from Community:InformationOverload: Why you never see people complaining about “knowledge overload”…

=> SamRose | Community:InformationOverload | Why you never see people complaining about “knowledge overload”…

1. “Your ability to track, read, digest and understand blog posts cannot match the exponential volume of blogs emerging on the internet every day (even just in the subject areas that you are interested in).”

2. “~f your intent is to be a source of re-usable knowledge, then focusing on frequency of posting, and statistics of people looking at your web or blogsite could become difficult to sustain.”

3. “A more sustainable approach for digesting, understanding, and sharing for the 80% of people who will not be one of the widely-followed blogs, is to do it in a form that others can digest, understand, and share.”

It makes me want return to writing wiki pages on this site instead of blog pages (like this one). Start with a copy of a good blog page on a topic, copy it to a page without date prefix, and integrate other good pages instead of just appending to them (like the tag or category pages will).

On the topic of my RPG-related blogging, I have a few things that I keep returning to:

=> RPG

1. My current set of house-rules, somewhat collected on House Rules

2. The underpinnings of my play style, somewhat collected on How I Roll

3. There’s also a much longer German page describing what I like as a player, 2010-03-01 Spielervorlieben

4. The underpinnings of my referee style, somewhat collected on Know Your DM

5. A wide variety of pages on the abstract idea of writing short texts, currently collected on Keep It Short

=> House Rules | How I Roll | 2010-03-01 Spielervorlieben | Know Your DM | Keep It Short

​#Wikis ​#Blogs

Comments

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I personally like the wiki nature of this blog very much, and if dropping the date prefix makes you happier, more power to you! Just keep the RSS feed, please (-;

– Harald Wagener 2010-11-05 18:18 UTC

Hehe, thanks. I think what I meant was that when I started this site, it was just a wiki. Then I wrote some code to add blogging functionality (mostly comment pages, RSS feeds limited to the DatePages, that kind of stuff). And then I slowly started to write more and more blog pages instead of wiki pages.

What’s the difference, you might ask. For me personally, wiki pages – having no temporal context – basically stand in a permanent WikiNow. When a reader comes accross the wiki page, the page says “this is what I say and I’m saying it right now” instead of “this is what Alex thought years and years ago and who knows whether he cares anymore”. I guess the implicit assumption is a wiki audience that will keep rereading the existing pages, questioning them, putting them back into context... Thus, maybe what I’m saying about the Wiki Now is just a dream that won’t work on a one person wiki.

There’s also the question of DocumentsVsMessages raised by LionKimbro, and WikiIsDocumentBased in particular.

=> LionKimbro

Hm, food for thought.

– Alex Schroeder 2010-11-05 20:54 UTC

=> Alex Schroeder

Yes, this is why blogs can be damaging in communities if there is no Wiki alternative. Even popular software communities suffer if they rely only on the hype of their bloggers and don’t promote a community-driven Wiki. It can be hard to find the blog entry with the example you want with Web search, and even quality entries can become poor style or useless with time or after a new release of the software. The comment section of blog entries try to make up for it with people submitting corrections, but there’s only so much you can “fit in the margins”.

– AaronHawley 2010-11-09 22:23 UTC

=> AaronHawley

Interesting – I’ve been thinking the exact same thing for my blog/wiki. My intent for some time now has been to write stub blog entries, and then expand them into full pages. But I almost never go back and do that... so I just end up with sort of half-thoughts that are never expanded upon.

– awwaiid 2010-12-12 20:47 UTC

=> awwaiid